Carlingford Dental
Professional athletes have poor dental health, certainly worst than expected, despite frequent cleaning and a healthy lifestyle. Many athletes were concerned about this situation, and wished to improve their dental, health, fearing it would have a negative impact on their sporting performance.
Given their diligent brushing and cleaning we would expect athletes to have impeccable dental health. Especially with their dedication to anything that affects their sporting performance. These individuals don’t smoke or eat junk food to any degree. But there are aspects of the sports lifestyle that compromise dental health.
Athletes, especially over the last generation, have tended to use sports drinks, energy bars, and energy gels. These contain more sugar that is generally acknowledged. And this high sugar content, which stays on the teeth for the duration of the training and and sports events, is steadily damaging teeth and gums. Athletes training most days of the week may be exposing their teeth to sugar for several hours per day. brushing afterwards is not enough to prevent the damage that is already done by all this sugar exposure.
Even without the sugary drinks athletes were compromising their dental health if they had a dry mouth. A dry mouth, often the result of constant running or sporting exertion, leads to increased bad bacteria that cause tooth decays, gum disease,and bad breath. Ironically, the sports drinks were meant to prevent the occurrence of dry mouth. but the ended up replacing one dental problem with another.
Swimmers obviously didn’t have problems with a dry mouth, but the situation was just as bad for their teeth because of the exposure to chlorinated water in swimming pools.
Using water instead of sports drinks would go a long way to preventing most of these dental problems in athletes. This would keep us hydrated, and keep the mouth moist and clean.
Carlingford Dentist
Talk to your dentist about the best way to keep your teeth and gums healthy. Prevention is better than cure.
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